Proposed 8 story Mission Bay development

Don Stock from Mission Bay - Kohimarama Residents Association

Update 14 Sept
The application for resource consent has now been publicly notified. The clock is now ticking on submissions, which are due in by 10 October.

You can view the application on the Council website. Since the developer is breaching the height limits for the zone, he has to demonstrate that there will be less than minor adverse effects arising from this. The key documents where he tries to make this case are the "Landscape Visual Effects Assessment" and "Urban Design Assessment" documents. In those you will see how he views Mission Bay as having little natural character right now, and it is all going to be built up to 4 stories anyway, so the development won't have much impact.

The Residents' Association's initial goal is to try to ensure as many people in Mission Bay and surrounding suburbs are aware of the proposal and the impact such a massive 8 story development like this this will have on the suburb. To that end we are planning a public meeting for 7pm Wednesday 3 October at the Selwyn College Theatre. By then, we hope to have analysed the application and have graphics which show a more representative view of how the development will look from around the area. We will also explain how the resource consent process will work and how we can help you make a submission. We will let you know more about the meeting over the coming weeks, but please mark it in your diary and let your friends know about it.

You will see a number of photo montages on the Council site which purport to represent what the development will look like from different vantage points. The developer has tried to be obscure the fact that the development will stand out like a sore thumb by taking photos with a very wide angle lens (17mm) which makes everything look further away, and which makes the incremental impact of the development appear correspondingly smaller. If the photo montages were based on photos with a 50mm lens which is close to how a human eye sees things, the impact of the new development would be huge. Read the fine print at the bottom of each photo; the optimum viewing distance when the photos are printed on an A3 sheet is typically just 100mm. if you are looking at these on a typical computer screen you would have to almost touch your nose to the screen to meet the developer's guidelines, and if you are looking on a phone or tablet, you would have to cut off your nose and trim your eye lashes to get as close as recommended! That is how much he is trying to distort our perception to make his project look better.

Best regards
Don Stock
Chair
Mission Bay Kohimarama Residents Association